Amaya
Activity Statement

Starting from April 16, 2003, Amaya stopped being a W3C Activity, as defined in the W3C Process Document. Amaya continues as an Open Source project, with its main contributors being W3C and INRIA. Development of Amaya inside W3C has moved on to the Systems Team.

1. Introduction
2. Amaya at W3C
3. What the Future Holds
4. Contact

Introduction

Amaya is W3C's own full-featured Web client. Amaya integrates a browser, a "WYSIWYG" authoring tool, and gives direct access to Web servers (get/put). It provides developers with many specialized features including multiple views, where the internal structural model of the document can be displayed alongside the browser's view of how it should be presented on the screen.

Amaya puts the focus on integrating Web technologies. An important benefit of Amaya is that it implements W3C specifications very carefully. This allows Web authors to make sure they are producing correct markup, which is easy to maintain or re-purpose for other devices. A more important benefit is that it lets authors mix W3C technologies and edit them in a uniform way (uniform representation, uniform commands).

Amaya at W3C

Amaya is developed at W3C as an Open Source project. Core team include Irène Vatton, José Kahan, Laurent Carcone, and Vincent Quint. It is used by several groups within the Consortium to demonstrate their work. As an experimental platform, Amaya plays an important role in the areas of:

• HTML: The way Amaya handles documents strictly follows Document Type Definitions. As an editor, it is guaranteed to produce compliant code. It handles HTML 4.01 documents but also XHTML 1.0 (Transitional, Strict, or Basic) and XHTML 1.1 documents, including both simple and complex ruby annotations. Menus are automatically customized according to the current profile of the document being edited and the author is assisted when s/he wants to change the profile of a document.
• HTTP protocol: Amaya accesses remote sites by means of HTTP/1.1, as implemented in libwww. It takes advantage of the most advanced features of HTTP, such as digest authentication to allow secure browsing, pipelining to save network bandwidth, and conditional requests using etags to allow cooperative remote publishing. Experimental support of WebDAV is also provided.
• MathML: The presentation markup of MathML is implemented which allows users to browse and edit Web pages containing complex mathematical expressions. Amaya handles isolated MathML documents, but also XHTML and XML pages that include mathematical expressions through the use of namespaces. Special attention has been paid to the tight integration of mathematics within text.
• SVG: Amaya provides limited support of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). These graphics, written in XML, may be mixed freely with XHTML and MathML markup. The screen below shows how you can display graphics including mathematical expressions on the screen side by side with the corresponding XML markup.

• Style sheets: Amaya has extensive support for the W3C style sheet language CSS. A simple-to-use interface helps users to write style sheets for Web documents while hiding some details of the syntax associated with style sheet rules and properties. You can create colored text, change the font, set the background color and control other presentational effects. CSS style sheets may also be used to alter the look of any XML documents.
• Internationalization: Users can select the dialogue language through a configuration menu (currently English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Finnish). Other languages based on the Latin script may be added by users without recompiling the application. Amaya supports a large set of document encodings (UTF-8, ISO-8859-*, Windows, JIS, etc.), bidirectional writing, and multilingual documents. It takes the current language into account when spell-checking or hyphenating.
• XLink: Simple unidirectional hyperlinks are available in HTML by means of anchors. XML Linking Language (XLink) is used for setting unidirectional hyperlinks from MathML, SVG or any other XML elements.
• RDF, XPointer: Amaya includes a collaborative annotation application based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), XLink, and XPointer. Annotations are external comments, notes, and remarks that can be attached to any Web document or a selected part of the document. Annotations are stored either locally or into annotation servers. The creation of annotations on a document doesn't modify the document itself.
• XML: Amaya is able to read any XML documents and to format such documents through CSS style sheets.

Current Situation

The current public release is Amaya 8.0 (15 April 2003) and is available both in source code and ready to use forms. The latest available snapshot dates from 21 February 2003. The Amaya software is written in C and is available for Windows, Unix platforms and Mac OS X. It can be freely downloaded from the W3C site.

Documentation is provided at every level, catering for the beginner right through to the developer wanting to extend the software for their own purposes.

The Amaya CVS base is publicly available. It has world read-only access, but write access may be opened to other developers.

What the Future Holds

The plan is to continue our effort on XML, in particular the editing of generic XML documents and their association with CSS style sheets. At the same time, significant progress on SVG editing is expected. Future releases will provide more complete support of SVG, better rendering, and a suitable editing interface.

Important work on the WebDAV support in Amaya is in progress and will be released in a future version.

The team will continue to work with other W3C Activities to help demonstrate and test new developments in a variety of areas.